A collection of interests, inspirations, ideas, opinions and outcomes.

POSE! “That’s not me”

The first photograph was taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicephore Niepce. Sine then the phenomena has grown, photographs now aren’t only for the wealthy. They also aren’t only used for cataloguing belongings and family tokens. Now photographs are used as an everyday tool for many purposes, but are they as meaningful as they once were?

It seems since photography has become available to most people and has a practically infinite memory capacity people have taken advantage of this greatly. The selfie culture has arisen, where people take many photographs of themselves throughout the weeks, causing them to have a mass amount of photographs of their own face. Compared to the one precious photograph of a family member previously taken this constant snapping has become an issue.

This lecture was stating how photographs are increasing and the meanings behind them are diminishing. This is an issue we face as our camera seem to be becoming an extension of our own eyes, now we don’t look at the beautiful view of a hillside we take a photograph of it and upload it to Facebook.

The selfie culture also has a darker side as the advantages of apps and software make editing available to the normal person. This editing is causing an unrealistic view of a person, making the photograph even more meaningless and creating a sense of narcissism.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2014) from The Guardian States that “the desire to be accepted morphs into a relentless quest for status, which undermines other people and impairs our ability to build and maintain happy relationships and successful careers.” He explains that those who are constantly involved with the selfie culture are displaying narcissistic behaviour, being that they are taking these photographs as a way to gratify their own opinions of themselves or to make them increase confidence in their looks. This fascination with identity is an issue that needs to be solved.